I work for a large Australian government department that is charged with the responsibility of distributing of TENS OF BILLIONs of dollars of taxpayers' money. My unit is the data analysis unit. The following conversation really took place, and is fairly typical of the calibre of conversations in my unit.

Manager of unit walks out of her manager's office (call him Bigwig) over to underling's desk (call him Underling), looks around and leans over speaking in a low voice out of the corner of mouth.

Mgr: "Underling, integers have decimal places don't they? Bigwig's trying to tell me they don't. He's wrong isn't he?"Underling: (squirming) "...ah..no..."Mgr: "Well hang on, they CAN have decimal places, can't they?"Underling: "er...no..."Mgr: "...but in some cases they can, right?"Underling: "Don't think so."Mgr: (annoyed) "Well why not? What's wrong with an integer having decimal places? Why can't 1.3 be an integer?"Underling: "There's nothing wrong with 1.3 having a decimal place..."Mgr: "So that's OK?"Underling: "Yes..."Mgr: "See I knew it..."Underling: "...it's just not an integer..."Mgr: "Hmm I still don't think that's right. Can you quickly check through the data and see whether any of our integers have decimal places? I'm sure Bigwig's wrong."Underling: "Yep, sure. Could take a few days. We have a lot of data."Mgr: "Thanks Underling."

We had an issue at one place I worked (names withheld to protect the imbeciles) where there was a problem with some development code failing with a truncation error trying to put data into a varchar(50) field. It turns out the developers had allowed the data entry in the application to accept 500 characters figuring the database would "just sort it out".

However the best thing was when the department manager (who went on to become the IT director) called the DBA's into his office and demanded that we check the database for "any more of these varchars"...

I'm troubleshooting an issue with the operations tech at our company before I had remote access and could do such things myself. I'm telling him what to type in the console and I tell him to end the command with a semi-colon. My husband hears me say - "Semi-colon. (pause) Semi-colon. (pause) It's the comma with the dot on top." He practically falls on the floor laughing.

That reminds me of the time I was working with a doctor who had to enter some notes into the system and didn't want to. For diagnosis he typed ":". I said "what does that mean?" He said "constipation". Took me a while to get it (full colon).